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Eight Is Enough For Father’s Day

It’s Father’s Day this weekend and if you want to buy the Best Dad in the World something unique, we have come up with seven gadgets that might do the trick.

Apple Gets All Touchy Feely
Apple has decided to kill off the mouse and replace it with its Magic Trackpad, which brings the intuitive multi-touch gestures of Mac notebook trackpads to the desktop. With its glass surface, the wireless Magic Trackpad enables users to scroll smoothly up and down a page with inertial scrolling, pinch to zoom in and out, rotate an image with their fingertips and swipe three fingers to flip through a collection of web pages or photos. The Magic Trackpad can be configured to support single button or two-button commands and supports tap-to-click as well as a physical click.
RRP: $99
www.apple.com.au

Bright Light, Bright Light
Every dad needs a flashlight and when you think of flashlights, you can’t go past the quality of Maglite. Going one step better is the The Maglite XL100 LED Flashlight, a breakthrough in flashlight technology. Designed for optimum light output, this new flashlight delivers user-friendly, performance-oriented features in a sleek, tactical design. Engineered from the ground up, this advanced lighting instrument is driven by the next generation of MAG-LED technology and includes the Advanced Flashlight User Interface. The Maglite XL100 flashlight features a push-button tail cap switch with (5) selectable modes, plus lockout (prevents accidental operation). And it even has a strobe function, for those dads that want to relive their disco days.
RRP: $99.95
www.maglite.com

Blu-ray Player With Wi-Fi
For dads that spend a lot of time on the couch watching movies, LG's BX580 boasts 3D Blu-ray disc playback provides a spectacular 3D home viewing experience. It offers a channel for the ever-increasing array of 3D content in the Blu-ray format. And with built-in Wi-fi and Netcast functions, this Blu-ray player opens the doors to the limitless world of online content. The BX580 is also the first Blu-ray player in the Australian market to come equipped with embedded access to BigPond Movies, and a range of other content including YouTube, Picasa Web Albums and AccuWeather – letting your Dad stream content direct onto his TV via the Internet.
RRP: $379
www.lge.com.au

A Kobra for the Kitchen
Does your Dad think he could be on the net MasterChef? Is Dad an up and coming gourmet chef? Well, with the De Buyer Kobra 19.3° V handheld Mandolin, he may well have a sporting chance. This is a chef’s best-kept secret in food preparation, cutting slicing time when compared to the ordinary kitchen knife. The sharp v-shaped blade of the mandolin helps turn those last-minute meals into elegant masterpieces that can help take anyone to the upper echelons of home cookery. While the blade is of the highest class and sharpness, this handheld Mandolin ensures safety-first features such as anti-skid feet, protective pusher and silicone moulded anti-sliding handle to keep fingers well away. Using the Kobra Mandolin is one of the safest and simplest way to prepare food safe and professionally. The standout feature of the Kobra is its vast variety of slice thickness settings – everything from finely julienned carrots to the thinnest slices of cucumber making it undeniably the best tool to get a stir fry prepped or salad chopped and plated on the table in top speed.
RRP: $149.99
www.tomkin.com.au

Write Away
For the dad that writes a lot or needs to take notes and transcribe them later, there is the Livescribe Echo, a digital pen that writes, records, transcribes and even pencasts. But best features of Livescribe’s digital pen are that it captures written notes, also records audio at the same time, and then syncs the two together. All you need to do is tap the pen anywhere on a page and it will replay what was recorded. You can even attach headphones to the pen whilst replaying the recording. Best of all, the pen can then save all the work as a PDF and then upload it onto any computer which you can then email away as a pencast. It also supports a number of other languages, so no need to translate any documents.
RRP: $209
www.livescribe.com.au

Touch Time Kenneth Cole
New York has launched its new touch screen watch series, allowing dad to interact with time with the touch of his finger. The device aims to inspire a new generation of Dads already passionate about touch-screen technology available on smartphones and music players. The collection mixes traditional and fashion-tech features in a modern sleek design and maintains the brands signature, classic look with a stainless-steel round case paired with a silicon strap. The watch functionality includes 32-City world time and an alarm, stopwatch and light up screen. Both the aesthetic and ease of use makes the watches practical for everyday use and for every occasion and perfect for professional or the sporty on-the-go dad. The watches can be found at selected Myers, David Jones and Angus and Coote Stores and leading jewellery stores.
RRP: $279
www.kennethcole.com

Dad’s Dock Around the Clock
The quality of the sound output from the Pioneer NAC-3 dock is impressive and, whatever genre is played, the 6.6 cm full-range speakers with 7.7 cm Passive Radiators with full-spectrum audio and bass work a treat. Swapping from iPhone to iPod is easy and for those Dads who are a bit impatient and want to quickly search through the tracks of one or both players, simply pushing the Hi-Lite Scan button to get a 10 second preview of all tracks on either one or both docked iPods/iPhones does the trick. Pioneer’s NAC-3 dual dock is definitely one for Dad’s workspace or office.
RRP: $699
www.pioneer.com.au

Digital Device For Musical Dads
Media artist Toshio Iwai and Yamaha have collaborated to design a new digital musical instrument for the 21st century, called the Tenori-On. A 16×16 matrix of LED switches allows your Dad to play music intuitively, while also creating a "visible music" interface. With the expandability offered by MIDI and sampled sounds, Tenori-On, brings a new musical dimension to live performance, studio work, and to Dad’s ability to sketch his musical ideas.
RRP: $1,199
www.yamahamusic.com.au

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CyberShack offers consumers a one-stop-shop for the most current information in the tech space, including news, lifestyle and products, as well as reviews on the latest gadgets and games. It also runs competitions and has links to the latest episodes of Cybershack TV.